eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

March 2018

03/25/2018

A Looking-Glass for Ladies: American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century REVIEW

In Lisa Joy Pruitt, recent book A Looking Glass for Ladies: American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century, the reader is given a comprehensive look at the experience of female missionaries and their reports of those experiences. Pruitt provides a brief introduction to the origins of American missions in the Middle and Far East along with an analysis of their memoirs, their experience of marriage to missionaries and motherhood in foreign lands. She devotes a chapter to the work of women as educators, doctors, and nurses and concludes with a chapter of women has administrators of their own missionary organizations.

Throughout the book, Pruitt notes the influence that missionary women had on American perceptions of the “orient” and highlights how the place of women in these various societies served as a primary justification for the support of the entire missionary endeavor. Ironically, Pruitt often refers to the disparaging comments made by missionaries regarding the women that they encountered in turkey, china, Burma, and India as “tropes” and yet she concludes the book with a survey of the state of women’s rights in some of these countries that contests that even to a modern observer, the life of women in some parts of the word does not compare favorably with the life of women in contemporary America.

One suspects that 19th Century missions supporters asserted that the preaching and reception of the Christian gospel was the necessary catalyst to improving the lot of women whereas today, a message of human rights and support for women’s education, disconnected from religious conversion suffices. 19th century missionaries, no doubt, could not have conceived of a society that rejected Christianity and protected a woman’s right to actualize her potential. They saw religion as the basis for all improvement in human social systems and reports of gender oppression were synonymous with assertions to a need for conversion, ergo, more missionary support.

To the modern ear, the missionary cant about the state of women in the Orient (a region that comprises many different sub-cultures from Morocco to Egypt to Syria to turkey to Iran to China, Burma, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) sounds pompous, bigoted, and arrogant. It is full of the sound of “our-religion-is-better-than-yours.” One should note however that the motives of most American missionary women were rooted in two vital convictions. One was that the true sign of personal holiness was a disinterested benevolence towards all humanity. Kindness and affection for one’s own family and circle of friends was not enough. Holiness involved a sincere and active affection for all human beings no matter how remote. A second conviction was, as stated, that all human social problems were the consequence of erroneous theology which was always a consequence of having not read and believed the Bible. The Reverend Joel Hawes put it this way in one of his sermons in support of the American missionary movement:

“Throughout the world, where the Bible is unknown, woman is ignorant, degraded, substantially enslaved ; a poor, trembling drudge, waiting on the desires of a haughty, domineering master. But wherever the Bible has diffused its light and power, there it has restored woman to her proper place in society ; it has redeemed her from an Egyptian bondage of body and mind, and while it has given greater sensibility and delicacy to her affections, it has enlarged her understanding, purified her taste, adorned her manners, dignified her character, and widened exceedingly the circle of her influence and enjoyments.”

For women who wished to live useful lives on behalf of the wider world they were required to care about, missionary activity that sought to bring the Bible, translate the Bible, distribute the Bible, preach the Bible, and teach girls and women to read so that they could access was the apex of holiness and the royal road to sainthood. Missionary women were paragons of virtues that all American Christian women were taught to admire. And American women were interested in reading about them. Pruitt explains as follows.

“In an extensive bibliography appended to his Encyclopedia of Missions, Edwin Munsell Bliss identified seventy American missionary memoirs published before 1870. Fifty-four of them (77%) had missionaries to Asia as their subject. Twenty-six of the twenty-seven memoirs about women focused on women who served in Asia. Americans, especially American women, clearly wanted to know about the condition of women in the ‘Orient’ and the work of missionary women to ameliorate those conditions.”

A person would be hard pressed to find where an aspiring intelligent woman of the early 19th century could have looked to have seen a door opening to her with more meaningful work.

Question for Comment: How do you determine just how wide the circle of your disinterested benevolence should expand?

03/24/2018

American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and Practice REVIEW

This book seeks to uncover just how the involvement of women shaped the way that American Christians thought about missions and missionaries and how those thoughts reflexively impacted women who chose to serve as missionaries.

From the first sermon delivered to a woman missionary (Ann Judson) in 1812, to present missionaries today, changes in thinking have led to changes in the way that missionary work of women has been done and evaluated. For the Reverend Jonathan Allen in 1812, the purpose of the female missionary was akin to that of her husband. She was to go to places where humans had not been reached with a message and deliver it to them.

“It will be your business, my dear children, to teach these women, to whom your husbands can have but little or no access. Go then, and do all in your power,, to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth. Go, and if possible, raise their character to the dignity of rational beings, and to the rank of Christians in a Christian land. Teach them to realize that they are not an inferior race of creatures but stand upon a par with men. Teach them that they have immortal souls …”

Ironically, a contemporary Christian might regard it a duty to send a missionary back to 1812 with a similar message to the Reverend Allen.

Dana Robert notes that in the early 19th Century, the great aspiration of newly minted Christian converts was “usefulness.” The primary way that one might know that they had been “chosen by God for salvation” was to be seen in their “disinterested benevolence” – that is, in their tendency to use their lives for the benefit of others, regardless of the impact to the self. For most Christians then, the missionary life in a foreign land was considered the ideal life – the more degraded the people they went to save and the harsher the conditions, the better (Even the missionaries to Hawaii had to frame their surroundings in the most dire light). Early American female missionaries were thus often “drafted” by their husbands and the boards who sent them out because they had exhibited a combination of religious orthodoxy, intelligence, and a history of service to the needy.

For many of these early American women missionaries, the mission field seemed to be the only place where they were allowed to throw themselves at challenges they thought worthy of their abilities. Sarah Huntington, later wife to Syrian missionary Eli Smith wrote,

“What a blessed work, to be the messenger of glad tidings to a guilty world! I have more than once, of late, wished myself a young minister. The triumphs of divine grace, and the presages of millennial glory, some times induce such overpowering impulses in my soul, that I want to burst the confines of my sex, and go forth a public ambassador for Christ. To check such feelings, which should not be deliberately indulged, requires an effort.”

Harriet Lathrop wrote of this frustration in 1814. “When I reflect on the multitudes of my fellow creatures who are perishing for lack of vision, and that I am living at ease, without aiding in the promulgation of the Gospel, I am almost ready to wish myself a man, that I might spend my life with the poor heathen. But I check the thought, and would not alter one plan of Infinite wisdom...But what can I do? a weak, ignorant female. One thing only do I see. My prayers may be accepted. Yes I will plead with my heavenly Father, that he may be a Father to the poor benighted heathen.” The author notes that in most cases, these women chose the career and then chose the husband as a means to their desired purposes. They wanted to live useful meaningful lives. Marriage to a man being sent to a foreign mission field was for some the only way to get there.

In chapter two of the book, the author moves to an analysis of missionary women in the field once they began to have families. Soon, he notes, one can see a shift in emphasis. No longer able to carry out the work of the male missionaries because of their duties as mothers, the emphasis shifts to providing “the heathen” with a model of the ideal Christian home (as defined in a New England religious context). Where possible, missionary women educated local boys and girls along with their own children and that became central to their purpose (whether they saw it as an ideal use of their abilities or not at times).

“I sometimes grieve that I can no more devote myself to the language, & the study of my Bible. But I do not indulge myself in it. I believe God appoints my work; and it is enough for me to see that I do it all with an eye to his glory. Perhaps my life may be spared to labor yet more directly for the heathen.”

“My spirit is often oppressed as a day closes, busy and bustling as it may have been, to see so little accomplished. I could never have conceived when thinking of going to the heathen to tell them of a Saviour, of the miscellany of labor that has actually fallen to my portion ... There are those on missionary ground who are better able to realize their anticipations of systematic work. But not a mother of a rising family, placed at a post like this... A feeble woman in such circumstances must be content to realize but little of the picture her youthful mind has formed of sitting down quietly day by day, to teach heathen women and children.”

As a consequence of their parental duties, women began to “make lemonade from their lemons and determined that they could be useful in setting an example of what a Christian home looked like and letting that be enough. To the leader of the ABCFM’s missionary approach, Rufus Anderson, this was what the missionary wife should be doing with her time.

“The heathen should have an opportunity of seeing Christian families. The domestic constitution among them is dreadfully disordered, and yet it is as true there as everywhere else, that the character of society is formed in the family. To rectify it requires example as well as precept."

“She must have female teachers, living illustrations...And the Christian wife, mother, husband, father, family, must all be found in all our missions to pagan and Mohammedan countries.”

By the time we arrive at chapter three, we are ready for another “phase transition” in the way that female missionaries were prepared and regarded. To convert someone to Protestantism required a foundational literacy that many people that missionaries were sent to did not have. Protestantism relies heavily upon the need for a direct communication between the individual and God, a communication system that can exist only so long as the convert can read the Bible. Women soon began to play a vital role in the development of that requisite literacy and though men might sometime resist the implications of independent women on the mission field, it became obvious that it was work that women could do well and do at less expense. Fortuitously, it was soon discovered that the people of these various corners of the globe wanted education and literacy a good deal more than they wanted New England religion. Schools were an ideal way to create a context for missionary activity.

Missionary wives soon found themselves running boarding schools in their homes and neighborhoods and the need for single female teachers who could do the work without being distracted by their own children’s needs made the argument for sending single women as missionaries compelling.

Enter the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary founded by Mary Lyon in 1837. Mary Lyon was, according to the author, “the female counterpart of Rufus Anderson.” By 1887, the school had sent out 175 foreign missionary women. This “Mt Holyoke missiology” as Dana Robert refers to it, began to blur the line between the missionary as a converter and the missionary as civilizer. The work of the mission could be regarded as successful only when souls turned to the message of the gospel and believed it but … a great deal of success could be claimed even if that never happened so long as the educating mission made it more possible that it would happen someday.

It was only a matter of time before some of the graduates of Mt. Holyoke began to disagree with Anderson and Lyon and insist that the work of a teacher itself was meaningful enough. There were those who might not be paragons of heterodox faith who still wanted to be useful and lead meaningful lives. With the death of hundreds of thousands of young men in the Civil War, the argument became even more compelling. For many women, there were no men to marry and the opportunity to play a role in the lives of children involved being a teacher by some means and perhaps in a foreign country if that was where the need was. Soon, women decided to found their own mission society so as to open up the possibilities that the male dominated Protestant ABCFM denied them.

By the time we arrive at chapter four (Women’s Work for Women) we begin to see traces of an increased secularization of the missionary purpose. The motivations of missionaries begins to look more like the Peace Corp than the Calvinist search for converts. The rise of the social Gospel movement in the U.S. has a marked influence on the work of world missions and women begin to play an ever larger role in whether teaching or preaching is the central verb of the missionary life. The earliest missionaries (like Ann Judson) had set out to make the lives of women around the world better. This had to be done through the medium of gospel conversion and preaching however. Incrementally, the work of making lives of women around the world better begins to serve as the mission itself. Thus, for many, life as a medical doctor or nurse in a foreign land made perfect sense as a way to live out the life of a disciple.

We are a little over halfway through the book and a number of other transitions of missionary ideology to go but this post is long enough and suffices for my purposes. And it is late.

Question for Comment: Does the society you live in provide you with opportunities to make your life a useful one?

Readers of my blog (and there are not many) will look long and hard to find something like what I am reviewing here. But this is what happens when you only look to your children for book suggestions once in a great while (Thanks Skyler). I am not sure that Snow Crash qualifies as “cyberpunk” but for now, it will have to be the closest thing I have come to it. “Low life with high tech” is the way that I heard the genre explained. It’s stories involve marginalized loser types as protagonists in worlds of advanced technology. In Snow Crash, the hero protagonist is literally named “Hiro Protagonist” who works for a mafia run pizza delivery service and our heroine is a fifteen year old skateboarder named “Y.T.”

Hiro calls himself “the deliverator” and carries a business card that reads:

The fascinating thing to me in this novel is how the author has taken a suspicion of mine, confirmed it, and then inverted my moral take on it. I have long suspected that fantasy worlds of the kind that modern movies, television, graphic novels, computer and role playing games, and etc. are made out of are slowly but surely replacing the real world as legitimate places to invest energy. My estimation of this movement has been generally negative in its disposition. “How unfortunate,” I would say, “that a person with much ability to make a name for himself or herself in the real world is diverted into pseudo-accomplishment in the imaginary world.” Hiro and Y.T. do not share my assessment of this misfortune. They are quite happy to have it so.

Hiro is not dissatisfied with the powers that life in his “metaverse” gives him. He is willing to make the tradeoff. As the author explains, “That’s why Hero has a nice big house in the metaverse but has to share a 20’x 30’ in reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend beyond universes.” Hiro’s significance as a premier hacker gives him access and prestige in his online existence. Which is why, by his own confession, “it is so hard to get serious about anything.” In real life, “Hero is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in U-Store-It by the airport” we are told, “but in the entire world, there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into the Black Sun [an exclusive club in the metaverse].”

And what is the problem with that real world that makes the metaverse such a more attractive and alluring temptation? Freedom. Y.T.’s character may help us here as we learn more about her skill at hitching rides with her “plank” (skateboard) and “poon” (harpoon):

“Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box. Y.T. is not fond of boxes. Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary randomness. Keeps people on their toes, makes them react to her, instead of the other way round. Now these men are trying to put her in a box, make her follow rules.”

Boxes Cyberpunk heroes and heroines do not like them (unless they are X-Boxes I guess). They see following the rules that are required to succeed in the real world (“Fedland” as Stephenson calls it) as a form of soul-selling. One might imagine Hiro or Y.T. modifying Jesus’ famous caution and saying “What shall it profit a man (or fifteen year old girl) if he make it in the real world if the cost is his own soul?” For Y.T. and Hiro, it is better to keep one’s soul and shuck the world. "...when you live in a s---hole,” says the author, “there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince."

In the metaverse, Hiro Protagonist actually can be a hero protagonist. For there, he has access to some measure of control. “But his real reason for being in Flatland [a place for programming],” we read,

“is that Hiro Protagonist, last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking, they don't mess around. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworid of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page.”

And there it is. In the world of digital imagination, a marginalized loner - a pizza delivery guy - can exercise a Neitzschean “will to power.” In a world where programmers rule and not oligarchs, a single solitary coder can foil the nefarious plots of cultural, religious, material, and political power brokers. In this world, the the skateboarders and the people who live in storage units – the underclasses can win. They can hack into the code that the one percenters plan to use to turn the world into their private plantation of robots, and they can use those hacked digital spaces to deliver a message of defiance to their own liking and benefit:

“IF THIS WERE A VIRUS YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW. FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE; HOW'S YOUR SECURITY? CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION.”

Take that you one-percenters.

I would be remiss not to take a moment to consider the theme that my son thought I would find most interesting: Religious ideas as viruses. In the novel, Snow Crash, the main character has an extended dialog with a computerized librarian (a 1990’s version of Amazon’s “Alexa.” The focus of that conversation is about the relationship between human languages, computer languages, and the human mind. Much is made of the notion that human languages may be compared to computer languages. The gist of the argument, as I understand it (and mind you I am a novice when it comes to computer languages) is that there is a language embedded deep in the human brain that is akin to machine language in computers. Just as a person that could write code in machine language could subvert (hack) into codes written in C+ or Java, so also, a person who could speak to the human brain in its “hardwire language” could control humans. Hiro Protagonist comes to understand that the invention of languages (the Babel event) was an attempt to defend human beings from those who would have gained control over them by their ability to speak directly to the original language. By diversifying languages, it became impossible for viruses to spread as soon as they were introduced.

For Stephenson, religions and religious ideas are like viruses and vaccines. Some will provide access to the controllers and some will create firewalls between you and their control. Since cyberpunks and hackers and skateboarded value their independence above all else, religions that are complicit with the aims of tyrants are bad religions and religions that prevent centralized control are good religions. Ironically, in Snow Crash, Christianity is seen as potentially either.

And so it has been historically.

It makes one wonder, in the history of the perception of Christianity, I wonder what percentage of the time it is seen as a bulwark against central control (the Reformation or the Catholic Church in Communist Poland) and what percentage of time it has been seen as a tool of that control (the Spanish Inquisition or Puritan Salem)?

Question for Comment: If someone were to have taken away all your access to imaginative worlds – novels, movies, TV, computer games, role playing games, etc. - would you have accomplished more or less with your life? Why?

Every once in a while one watches a movie that Rotten Tomatoes critics love to demean but I don’t mind saying that it had my attention for and hour and twenty two minutes. Maybe all it takes is a life experience to make you realize what sort of craziness a person is capable of when they are using a parental bond to think with. As the movie begins, we see Karla Dyson (Halle Berry) taking a phone call informing her that her ex-husband and his new partner plan to file for custody of her son. Immediately, you can see the impact of the trauma registering. And then her son is literally kidnapped by two low-life gator-eating trailer trash from humanity’s discard pile.

For the next hour, she chases them down all over the interstates and backroad bayous of Louisiana with her mini-van (and eventually kills them). It reminded me in many ways of Steven Speilberg’s 1971 debut movie, Duel, a film that consists of nothing more than a long car chase in which a 1955 Peterbuilt tanker truck hunts down the driver of a Plymouth Valiant in the Mojave desert. In both films, primal survival instincts are fully engaged in such a way that rational decision making takes a proverbial “back seat.”

Someone watching the from the safety of their living room will no doubt have a great deal of arm-chair advice to give this bad-ass in the making mother as she risks her life, the life of her son, and the lives of scores of other drivers and pedestrians in her single minded desperation. It is impossible not to see why there would be advantages to letting law enforcement systems to do their work. But people threatened with the loss of their children do crazy things. One should probably even predict that they will. They do things that make sense only to the amygdala and God, and maybe not even to the later.

So, regardless what has been said by its critics, this viewer was mesmerized by the whole thing.

Question for Comment: Ever done something that amounted to using your amygdala for brains?

03/09/2018

Ladybird is a character. Let’s start with that. Then let’s expand on that by saying that Ladybird is also a representation of a process. You can call it “individuation” or you can call it “identity formation.” Ladybird (given name is Christine McPherson) is a movie map of the journey from being a plaster cast of a family’s hopes for you to being yourself. They say that there are many pathways by which a small human learns to walk (something like 25 of 28 different babies arrived at walking through a different set of stages according to one study cited in Todd Rose’ book, The End of Average.) Similarly, there can be many different pathways from childhood to maturity. Ladybird the film provides us with one.

Over the course of the film. Christine wrestles her own self out of nuclear family. Or attempts to. She does not do it particularly well if you ask me. But, her circumstances do not make it easy. So, what does a young woman of 17 have to figure out as she makes her way into the world?

She has to figure out who her friends are going to be. She has to figure out what her ethical convictions are. She has to figure out what he beliefs about money are. She has to figure out who she is relative to who she comes from. She has to figure out how she will treat people. She has to figure out what her goals are in life. She has to figure out what her relationship to alcohol, tobacco, sex, religion, and drugs will be. She has to develop her own relationship with “where” she lives, with what she looks like, with what her abilities are and her weaknesses are, and with who her parents are really (not ideally).

One could take any one of these motif’s and use the movie to explore one’s own history of making or not quite making this transition. But consider the way that the movie portrays Ladybird’s formation of an ethical identity. She steals a magazine. She plays a plank on one of the nun’s at her school and lies about it. She lies to her mom about where she plans to go to college. She says hurtful things about her family. She lies to her friend about where she lives. She may well lie to her math teacher about her grade. She drinks. She smokes. She comforts a gay friend. She makes out with someone she barely knows. She ridicules a woman’s convictions about abortion. She forgives. She apologizes. She eats a box of wafers at her Catholic church. She gets drunk.

“I wish I could live through something,” Ladybird says in the opening scene. As it turns out, she will. That something is called individuation. As with many people her age, it requires a great deal of gunpowder, rage, and defiance to blast free of the family orbit but once she has done so and knows that she is free, she can start appreciating the love that helped her the chance to explore herself. Once free, she can actually decide what she thinks of herself, of her faith, of her family. While she is enmeshed in the web of her family, she has to declare herself independent by renaming herself “Ladybird.” When she passes over the Sacramento River and arrives at her far away college town, she can call home and tell them that her name is Christine … and that it is a good name.

The Artillery of Heaven : American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East REVIEW

Makdisi, U. S. (2008). Artillery of Heaven : American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ussama Makdisi’s book on the American Missionary impact on Lebanon and Syria was a refreshing and insightful journey into a subject I have read much about but from someone familiar with the story as it was experienced by the people of the region that Missionaries came to convert but not always to listen to. “The account offered by this book,” Makdisi writes,

“thus speaks not about a clash of cultures, and still less of civilizations, so much as a cultural encounter that pitted one group of Americans against one group of Ottoman subjects in a specific time and place.”

This is what I appreciate about it. One learns about the individuals that made up the people (“Orientals” in many forms) that missionaries often only wrote generally about. Makdisi leaves us knowing that there were missionaries who came to serve people and there were both benefits and mistakes that resulted from their doing so. “There is no such thing, he informs the reader,

“as the ‘fundamental egalitarianism’ of the Christian message or the simple ‘imperialism’ of American missionaries. There were Christians, there were (mixed) messages, and there were (eventually) new discourses of equality: but the relationships among all these were neither obvious nor fundamental, and certainly not straightforward.”

This is what one would expect of any story where humans meet humans. “For far too long,” Makdisi says,

“Secular Arab historians have shied away from religiously sensitive topics in the interests of a putative national unity, allowing the void to be filled with scholarship obsessed with the idea of perpetual hostility between Christian and Jewish minorities and an oppressive monolithic Muslim majority.”

As someone who reads this history from the perspective of the “heathen” (as the missionaries referred to them) there are a number of significant observations to remember when teaching about this subject. First, it is important to understand that, when conflict looms on the horizon, every culture will be susceptible to seeing the worst in another culture and the best in themselves.

Missionaries, for example, often pointed to the treatment of women, health and sanitation, the lack of sufficient education, and formalistic religion and morality as being the defining traits of “oriental” people. And yet they could overlook American slavery, alcoholism, the dispossession of Native Americans, and the civil war when referring to the problems of their own country. Indeed, missionaries were sent to the Middle East largely because it was impossible to obtain converts in Native America while taking Native American land. “Overseas was a space uncluttered by the incorrigible violence of American settler colonialism,” writes the author,

“which forced Indians consistently to give way to white expansion. The Bible lands were a proving ground for American redemption, ostensibly free of the entanglements and corruptions of American colonialism and Western empire, where Americans could glory in a language of benevolence that was rapidly running its course with Indians at home.”

In other words, in the Middle East, missionaries could say, “See, we are only here to be a blessing,” when it was impossible to say that in Georgia or Tippecanoe.

Secondly, Makdisi is gently unsparing of about what he finds out about missionary evaluations of Middle Eastern people in the missionary records. Missionaries, he reflects, found it much easier to say that they were loving the “heathen” than to say that they liked them. And this went right back to America’s first nationally recognized missionary, John Elliot.

“Eliot was worthy of admiration because he was actually concerned with re-deeming Indians, who, [revered] Mather wrote, understood no arts, built no homes, wore no clothes, had no physicians, built no ships, and had no language worth studying or religion worth reforming. ‘This,’ Mather notoriously added, ‘was the miserable people which our Eliot propounded unto him-self to teach and save! And he had a double work incumbent upon him; he was to make men of them, ere, he could hope to see them saints; they must be civilized ere they could be Christianized.’”

More than the Eliot he so admired, Mather captured the paradox of American mission work. He wanted to save Indians, but he detested them. He had, after all, been appointed by the New England Company in 1685 as a commissioner to over-see the evangelization of Indians, a position he held for three decades. Yet he wrote vituperatively of Indians. When he reflected on the failure of mission, there was little doubt where he placed the opprobrium. He acknowledged, as had Eliot before him, that there were ‘profane’ and ‘debauched’ English individuals, unscrupulous settlers who took advantage of the Indians, who defrauded them, and who plied them with alcohol. But ultimately he blamed the Indians themselves for their own wretchedness.”

Missionaries who went to the Middle East were all inspired by Elliot and by David Brainerd (as depicted by Jonathan Edwards) and it appears that those great role models gave them permission to write a good deal about how much the “heathen” needed some sort of salvation. Conveniently, the absence of conversions could thus be attributed to the depths of heathen depravity or to the power of a false religion’s ideas. There is a certain irony here because the missionary journals themselves are full of records of just how wicked the missionaries thought their own souls were. The difference between themselves and the wicked heathen amounted to an inability to see that wickedness or confess it on the part of the heathen.

Everything wrong in a culture devoid of good Sunday schools was attributed to the absence of Christ in that culture. Indeed, it was one of the missionary goals to use heathen culture as a laboratory demonstration of how much all cultures [including their own] needed their message. “The private, agonizing confessions of unworthiness recorded in his [David Brainers’s] diary, this book tells us,

“constantly competed with strident and unequivocal proclamations that Indians needed and required spiritual and civilizational tutelage, or what Brainerd described as ‘their utter inability to save themselves either from their sins or from those miseries which are the just punishment of them.’ As a model Christian, Brainerd demanded self-introspection. As a model for cultural interaction, however, he confirmed a fundamental conceit of mission work: those to be saved were to be the objects of unilateral transformation, their culture disparaged, their history ignored, their equality consistently denied. The missionary ethos of the innate similarity of all people before God was systematically undercut by a far more trenchant ethos of civilizational inequality that separated the generic heathen from the benevolent missionary.”

A third important observation that Makdisi makes is that the rejection of American missionary messages are understandable when one comprises the historical background that led up to the period that rejection took place. The Maronites of Lebanon had themselves only recently been accused by their mother church in Rome of allowing a foreign influence to enter the local churches of Syria and Lebanon and lead them astray. Maronite leadership was trying to prove to the Vatican that they had returned to the true faith and part of their resistance to the Protestant missionaries was a hyper-vigilant attempt to pre-empt a second round of “apostacy” during a period when they were still under probation. “Is-lam, as Ibn al-Qilagi made abundantly clear,” says Makdisi, “was a punishment from God, a warning to the Maronites about the prospect that awaited them should they continue to deviate from their ‘original’ orthodoxy.” Like the Pharisees in the New Testament, they were hyper-vigilant about not doing the things that they believed had caused their present state of subjection (Maronites to Islam – Pharisees to Rome). To Maronite leadrs, Christian peoples were being punished for not being faithful to their ancestral faith. To American Protestants, the conclusion drawn was precisely the opposite.

Fourthly, Makdisi observes that missionaries were being naïve to think that the sense of threat that they posed to Middle Eastern culture was a manufactured one. Were missionaries to read their own sermons, they would see that there were serious threats woven throughout the warp and woof. “[Yale President, Timothy] Dwight famously delivered a sermon at the fourth annual meeting of the American Board in Boston in September 1813,” we are told,

“He elaborated the broad field of missionary labor and described the ‘millions of the human race’ who awaited their gospel of liberation. ‘How amazing must be the change,’ he said, ‘when the Romish cathedral, the mosque, and the pagoda, shall not have one stone left upon another, which shall not be thrown down: when the Popish, Mohammedan, Hindoo, and Chinesian, worlds shall be created anew.’”

Consider that the reference he is making is to a prophecy of Jesus’ that Dwight believed was fulfilled when the Roman empire literally exiled the Jews from their own land and you can see a rather clear threat in this scriptural allusion. To cultures whose entire social structure was based on religious belief, these were not innocent or inconsequential announcements of intent.

A fifth observation that Makdisi makes that helps to better understand the relationships between American missionaries and their target populations has to do with just how badly missionaries misunderstood native reactions to their work as a result of not trying to understand the natives first. Missionaries did not fully understand how the social stability of places like Lebanon, Syria and Turkey depended upon a tacit agreements between religious minorities and majorities not to try and imperialize one another’s peace with conversion efforts. There is a certain irony here as well, for missionaries would accuse Muslim governments of proselytizing by force when in fact, the Ottoman government maintained social stability by not allowing anyone to “poach” other religious communities for converts. “The missionaries spoke loudly but they did not listen,” Makdisi says,

“Nor did they heed the many signals, if not outright pleas, from their first native informants, guides, and teachers to avoid what they believed to be unnecessary controversy. Their attempts to impress upon these men the ‘plain truths about their Popish doctrines and practices,’ as Fisk put it in his journal entry from October 1823, reflected a raw missionary sensibility and a fundamental belief in the power of biblical criticism to reveal the essential and trans historical divine truths contained in the Scriptures. This, after all, is precisely what Andover Seminary had inculcated in these Americans. But their enthusiasm also reflected an unwarrantable breach of general propriety whereby these men enjoyed the hospitality of their hosts only to ignore some of the most basic stipulations of religious discretion in a historically multi-religious land.”

“Because they privileged religious affiliation over all others, the Protestant missionaries spoke of the ‘derelict’ Jews, the ‘nominal’ or ‘professing’ Christians, and the ‘Mohammedans’ as if they represented segregated communities. In their letters and journals they routinely wrote about ‘a Catholic’ or ‘a Turk’ or ‘a Greek’ or ‘a Jew’ as if such religious identities were static, but also as if they were more ‘real’ markers than those of social discrimination between high and low, notables and commoners, or a Gyan and a Gwam.”

"Because rank rather than religion was the defining aspect of local political life under Shihabi hegemony, the leading Maronite families shared an elaborate elite culture with their Druze and Shia counterparts. This dictated even such details as the way they addressed letters to one another, how these were folded and sealed, the manner in which guests were praised and hosted, and the way the paramount Shihab emir greeted those who entered his court. A veritable taboo existed within Mount Lebanon against publicly probing into, let alone denigrating, the faith of others. Ottoman governors readily acknowledged in their own correspondence with Istanbul the suspect, indeed heretical, nature of the Lebanese chiefs, but in their own direct correspondence with these chiefs they invariably avoided broaching the topic. Maronite priests and monks laced their chronicles with references to infidels and schismatics, but in their public dealings and everyday inter-course with those of other faiths they politely avoided giving offense, and in turn expected no less.”

Makdisi’s point here is that the differences between elite Muslims, Catholics, and Jews were far more insignificant than significant. In the Ottoman Empire, class actually mattered more than faith. The missionary enterprise was a blatant attack on both. But, “Far more to the point,” writes Makdisi, “they also believed that one did not need to learn a culture before trying to convert it.”

There was a wicked psychological reality at work in this interaction. Americans were sure that the salvation of the entire region depended upon Americans bringing in a new truth from outside the culture. At least in the Maronite community, leaders were sure that any message coming from the outside was a threat to an essential orthodoxy. The antagonism between missionary and Maronite was a result of a perfect storm.

“Just as Jonas King and Pliny Fisk and the other missionaries had been unable to make sense of the society they sought to conquer on its own terms and instead painted it with the grossest brushstrokes on their sectarian canvas, so the patriarch in turn outlined his utter refusal to understand the “Biblemen” as anything but the ill heralds of a ‘new blasphemy.’ Both insisted that they were committed to saving souls, and both claimed biblical knowledge, yet both could articulate their benevolence only through the total repudiation of the other. Hubaysh accused the missionaries of attempting a variety of stratagems to seduce the Maronite faithful. Among them was that they wrote in Arabic; they preached; they journeyed among the people; they pretended to be compassionate and charitable to the poor; they bribed; they bought up authorized Bibles and in their place freely distributed their own copies filled with error. They even tried to seduce Maronites to their own country to teach them there and prepare them as missionaries to return to Mount Lebanon to spread their corrupt doctrines.”

American missionaries believed that God had been speaking to them and had stopped saying anything of value to the leaders of Eastern churches. “In the missionaries’ thinking, a conversion experience begun in America was completed there and then exported,” Makdisi writes, “just as printed and leather-bound Arabic Bibles were shipped in crates, presumably to be adopted in toto in the heathen parts of the world.” Maronite bishops believed that if God had anything to say to any Christian, it would be to them.

“For all his deliberate defiance of the will of the patriarch, [Isaac] Bird unwittingly played the part of the once dreaded Jacobite missionaries who had long ago plagued the Maronites in these same regions. He provided a church desperate to highlight its Catholic credentials with the perfect opportunity to rehearse a familiar drama.”

A sixth observation that bears consideration involves Makdisi’s researches into missionary the economic and denominational roots of many missionary reports and redactions of reports in the Missionary Herald. While the leaders of the American missionary movement never went into the field with the goal of obtaining wealth, finances were no small issue. The public wanted stories. They could be stories of great successes or they could be stories of great need or they could be stories of great opportunity. But reports for the public were necessary to the fund raising efforts back home.

“Rufus Anderson, the assistant corresponding secretary of the American Board, forwarded Isaac Bird copies of his own memoir of the Cherokee Catherine Brown and hoped to send another of the Hawaiianqueen Keopuolani. In turn he asked the missionary: “Can you not make a tract respecting Palestine, which will be popular? Some of you surely can. Send it home to be printed, as the production of one of you, or as your joint production, or in any way that suits you.”

“No matter how great the difficulties in the Ottoman Empire, Jeremiah Evarts, the American Board’s influential corresponding secretary, reminded Jonas King, men “are apt to grow cold in the best of causes, and great and constant exertion is necessary to keep them from fainting.” There was good reason for Evarts’s concern. The proliferation of national benevolent voluntary associations in the northeastern United States such as the American Home Missionary Society, the American Tract Society, the American Sunday School Union, and myriad other, smaller missionary organizations, most of which were similarly committed to purging the national frontiers of Methodist and Baptist revivalists and to transforming a disparate population into evangelical American Christians, competed with the American Board for the attention and purse strings of an American a foreign emphasis.”

American Protestants felt themselves to be in a life or death struggle with Catholicism back in America and the leaders of that Protestant side were not ignorant of how reports about Catholic atrocities in the Middle East could serve as ammunition in the war for America’s soul. In 1927, Isaac Bird published the story of the persecution of a Maronite convert to Protestantism. Bird deleted all references to Asaad Shidyak’s reverence for his native church leadership in telling his story because to do so would have compromised its use as an anti-Catholic tract (like spraying water on your gun-powder). Assad’s “torture at the hands of ‘papists,’ his refusal to recant, and his oppression in a gloomy ‘dungeon’ in the lands of Islam fed American Protestant prejudice,” Makdisi suggests,

“Rufus Anderson had complained bitterly to Bird about the Catholic invasion of America in October1825. ‘Already they form a powerful hierarchy in this land of light and freedom,’ he warned, ‘and yet carry on their operations so quietly and slyly and civilly that our churches all feel secure and some of them, that is the liberal, seem heartily to bid them God speed. Continue therefore to expose the policy and wickedness of that ch[urch] as you see in Palestine.’”

In short, what was inconceivable to the missionaries, was the possibility of a religious or social reformation in Islamic lands that did not involve conversion to a completely new faith. They agreed with Lord Cromer that a reformed Islam would be Islam no longer. To them, Muslim societies could not improve because Muslim people could not be regenerated by the teachings of anything found in the Qur’an. Rufus Anderson and the American Board stayed true to their Andover roots for decades. For them, the Christianization of Middle Eastern people had to precede their civilizing. Over time, missionaries in the field would slowly but surely begin to see things the other way, It was one thing to maintain a doctrine in the Halls of Andover. Another to do so in the alleyways and docks of Istanbul and Beirut. Missionaries like Daniel Bliss and cyrus Hamlin did not forget the importance of Christian conversion, but they begane to see that there were other and more effective ways to bring about the social good they had come to offer.

Take the Syrian Protestant College, in Beirut. With its secular civilizational aims, it could not have been a direct scion of the ABCFM. But it could be founded by one of its missionaries.

“’This College,’ said Bliss famously on 7 December 1871, as the cornerstone was laid of the main college building, designed in New York and built of the best grade of sandstone with cheap local labor, ‘is for all men without regard to colour, nationality, race, or religion. A man white, black, or yellow; Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution for three four or eight years; and go out believing in one God, in many Gods, or in no God. But it will be impossible for anyone to continue with us long with-out knowing what we believe to be the truth and our reasons for that belief.’”

Fifty years later, the college leadership had changed hands and commitments.

“Daniel Bliss’s son Howard succeeded his father as president of the Syrian Protestant College just after the turn of the twentieth century. Two decades later, in 1920, he proclaimed the advent of the ‘Modern Missionary,’ that is, one who accepts ‘ungrudgingly and gratefully’ that Christianity is not ‘the sole channel through which divine and saving truth has been conveyed.’ Indeed, confessed Bliss, such a missionary ‘comes to supplement, not solely to create. He prays for all men with a new sympathy—for all mosques and temples and synagogues as well as for all churches.’”

In a strange and twisted sort of anti-Providence, Harvard's Hollis chair of theology had been established in the heart of the Middle East by the sons of Andover graduates.

Question for Comment: It seems clear that education can be a catalyst to virtue and character formation. Do you think education is enough? Or must there be some … some divine spark that ignites a soul as well?

03/03/2018

Some moments in time contain accelerated meaning for the world I suspect. The events in the movies Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour are happening almost in parallel. One could imagine merging the two films to make one 5 hour epic of just what happened on the two sides of the English Channel in a matter of a few days in late May, 1940. What remains clear when both are over is that there were a lot of unknowns. Everything depended on the outcome of a few huge decisions and a million little ones. In hindsight, they all seem inevitable. “Of course the soldiers at Dunkirk got back to England,” one is tempted to say, “How else were they going to make a movie of it?”

When all was said and done, there would have been no legend of Winston Churchill if there had not been thousands of boats willing to pitch in for England. And had it not been for Churchill, there would not have been thousands of boats. This happens to be one of history’s great symbiotic moments between a leader and a people. It just so happened that everything depended on it being so.

Question for Comment: Has your life ever had a week or a day or an hour when the pace of meaning accelerated and everything really did change?